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Does this make sense to you or are you saying something else?

Here is where our confusion lies: the interest payment that you refer to that is equal to 9% of revenues, is just that: interest only. On the principal side, you have redemptions of bonds and bills that fall due. These obligations must be replaced by an equivalent principal amount of new issuances, PLUS an extra $60 billion per month of new issuances to fund the ~$700 billion run rate on the current budget deficit. It is that additional $700B/year or $60B/month that cannot be issued unless the debt ceiling is increased. It's not like they can cut, say $10B/month. The Teasury cannot owe more than $15.* trillion under the current debt ceiling. Treasury indebtedness cannot legally exceed the debt ceiling by so much as one dollar.

A detailed, current explanation of this is located here

BTW, the BPC, from which these figures come, is somewhat of an amalgam of GOP-e and Dem. They estimate that the 2011 shutdown cost the Treasury $1B to $2B in additional interest payments since then and that the current showdown may cost more. I don't dispute that. I would add, however, that in the overall context, that is a small price to pay for liberty. Even if we just look at is as dollars and cents, there is no comparison. Consider that Medicare and Medicade cost three times as much (per capita, inflation-adjusted) as they were originally budgeted. That is government waste, price signalling destruction, etc. Now apply Obamacare's cold clammy authoritarian hand to the nation's $3 trillion health care industry. That will be an additional $3 trillion of annual cost for poorer quality health care. Capitalize that at 5% and you see that Obamacare will cost the nation $60 trillion for poorer health care. No one in Washington will admit that, but you and I know that is how it will turn out based on history.

So a few billion in cost to fight this monstrosity? You bet! That's an easy decision.

Thank you, I will look at the linked information. Yes, I am saying that the President would have to prioritize payments to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each month until the debt ceiling is increased. And yes, that would presumably have a massive effect on the economy. I don’t think he would have any choice in the matter except to determine which otherwise required expenditures not to pay. I am not sure this is matter of confusion more than just different views about whether a) the President has such authority, and/or b) whether this is at all practical or whether the numbers are so high that this would be catastrophic for the economy. But I don’t think that failing to pay anything other than interest or maturing securities would be a “default”. How much of the budget beyond this is actual bills (for example, the government entered into a contract to pay someone a certain amount on a certain date) as opposed to other required expenditures, such as for entitlements or running the government or funding a program...? I don’t know the answer to that, and that could be a difficult distinction to draw in some cases, but I think that one of the disconnects in the media and among politicians in discussing this involves the meaning of “default”.